Private Sector Development

We’ve just released the 2016 update for the World Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) Database and it makes for some gloomy reading. Investment commitments (investments) in infrastructure with private participation in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs) fell by a whopping 37% compared to 2015.

There is a huge need for new and upgraded infrastructure around the world, particularly in emerging markets. Policy makers like to talk about raising trillions of dollars to fund infrastructure, but the truth is that capital for good projects exists. Regulation and lack of policy clarity are inhibitors.

What lacks is a strong pipeline of projects that meet societal needs and are financeable. If we can increase the quality of projects, and encourage smart and efficient regulations, the money to fund them will follow.

As infrastructure projects are increasingly decentralized to sub-national governments (SNGs) in many countries, policymakers are keenly interested in developing sub-national bond markets to open up access to private-sector financing. However, the transaction costs of bond issuance are still prohibitive for small SNGs.

Much is written about Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) from the perspective of the public sector, but one often forgets the private sector forms its own perspectives based on national and domestic market perceptions as well. These perceptions are always based on the availability of reliable qualitative and quantitative information.

Discussions with private sector leads has revealed that information gaps, more often than not, have proven to be obstacles that have resulted in “no-go” decisions on poorly articulated procurements initiated by inexperienced public sector procurement officers. Overcoming private sector hesitation is pertinent to the success of a procurement.

The largest Public-Private Partnership deal in Central America was recently highlighted at one of the world’s most prestigious universities during the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) 9th Annual Sustainability Summit. Under this year’s theme, Funding the Future, the event brought together more than 300 participants from students, startup CEOs, academia, think tanks and financial investors.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) require the coordination of an impressive number of stakeholders to mobilize the commercial financing needed to achieve sustainable, inclusive growth in challenging environments. A great deal of analysis, negotiation, and hard work goes into every project. And each one presents an opportunity to encourage investors to venture into countries and compete for projects they wouldn’t have considered before and, ultimately, to create new markets.

While the commercial and legal challenges involved in structuring PPPs are well known, the efforts that go into conducting rigorous technical due diligence are less well known. For example, projects that aim to provide utility scale solar PV on short order, like the World Bank Group’s Scaling Solar program, require a team of experienced engineers from IFC’s Energy and Water Advisory working hand in hand with our PPP transaction advisors, legal experts, and environmental and social specialists to make them a reality.

Islamic finance assets represent only around 1% of the global financial market,[1] so how can tapping into these funds help close the $452 billion annual infrastructure finance gap in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies?[2] The percentage may be small now, but the Islamic finance market is growing at an impressive pace—and not just in Muslim-majority countries.

There is a famous saying that a successful person can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

In real life however, the art of building a firm foundation is not always that simple. Waiting for others to simply throw bricks at you is not enough when the grand task is transforming infrastructure into an asset class. There is a need for a skillful bricklayer—and this is the role we see for the multilateral development banks (MDBs).

Just two years ago, Ghana was experiencing unstable commodity prices and a deteriorating macroeconomic situation. Yet, through a unique combination of World Bank guarantees nearly $8 billion in private investment was mobilized for the Sankofa Gas Project—the biggest foreign direct investment in Ghana’s history. The transformational project helped address serious energy shortages and put the country on a path to economic growth.

This is just one example illustrating how risk mitigation products play out in practice to encourage private sector investment and improve people’s lives.

Investing in infrastructure relies on well-designed, solid projects that both governments and private sector investors can confidently support. But globally, the pipeline of such projects is weak. No surprise, then, that actual infrastructure investments fall far short of demand—the resulting infrastructure gap is estimated to be $1 trillion annually. In the poorest developing countries, the situation is worse: since 2012, they have seen overall private investment in infrastructure fall leaving billions without basic services such as electricity, clean water, or sanitation.